


Letters and Landlines

by messofthejess



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Deutsch | German, F/M, Letters, Long-Distance Friendship, Long-Distance Relationship, Main Text in English, Phone Calls & Telephones, Stein speaks German at home and Marie speaks Swedish and it's just really damn cute, Svenska | Swedish, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8429473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messofthejess/pseuds/messofthejess
Summary: Between the heat and the sudden onset of puberty, Stein would really love to flip summer the double bird. But maybe keeping in touch with his new partner will make things a bit more bearable.





	

            Summer, in Stein’s professional adolescent opinion, could go suck a big one. Especially summer in the suburbs of Las Vegas, where the dry heat bore down on you the second you set foot outside. His parents meant well by keeping the air conditioning cranked up high so no one would sweat, but his poor circulation meant he had to be bundled in flannel and wool even when the outdoor temperature peaked over 100 degrees. And on those occasions where he _was_ forced to go outside, usually to the corner store for milk or something similarly mundane, he sweltered immediately, even under a white T-shirt. Argh.

            Puberty had also picked summertime to hit Stein like a freight train. Nearly every sentence he uttered—and he was a boy of so few words as it was—was punctuated with a yawn, and he was sleeping at least fourteen hours a day. That barely left him any time to run any long-term experiments; he grumbled sleepily at the dinner table about how he was “losing his scientific edge”. Last week he’d tried to tug on a pair of old workout pants he’d left behind when he went to the DWMA. They now came to his mid-calf if he pushed them down on his now well-defined hipbones. His mother Golda was at her knitting needles every night, ripping out the hems of old sweaters and adding inches onto them in an effort to keep up with her son’s growth spurt. It got to the point where Stein ransacked her scrap basket and clumsily stitched his own additions onto a gray sweater he was particularly fond of using a yarn needle and black yarn. Golda had a fit over breakfast the next morning at the sight of it. She insisted that she could teach Stein how to knit if he was so inclined, but after seeing him nearly face-plant in his scrambled eggs out of exhaustion, she dropped the subject. Probably best not to teach her boychik how to use more pointy objects if he could barely hold a fork right these days.

            Most of the time, Stein was in his room, either hunched over a lab notebook at his desk or napping on his bed. Sometimes he’d bother to get somewhat undressed. Other days he’d sprawl out in his day clothes, his legs dangling halfway off of the extra-long twin mattress. He thinks his dreams wouldn’t be half so hazy and violent if he could just get a damn cigarette or four, but he has no chance of stealing them from the corner store. The owner went to high school with Golda, and she’d go ballistic if she found out Stein was smoking. There were other days, though, where Stein would dream of unusually pleasant things. Wildflowers. A dock that stretched out into a calm northern lake. Giggles and wavy blonde hair woven into two thick braids. _Marie._

            He didn’t expect to hear from her, or from anyone at the Academy that summer. So when his mother marched into his room one humid afternoon in July and swatted him gently across the nose with an envelope, he didn’t budge.

            “ _Zeit aufzustehen_ ,” Golda whispered, which for her was about two steps above a stage whisper. She was a rabbi, and not a quiet one at that.

            “ _Noch fünf Minuten_ , Mama.”

            “ _Nien._ You have a letter, boychik.”

            Stein opened one bleary green eye and groaned. Brilliant. Perhaps Lord Death had reneged on the plea deal and kicked him out of the Academy after everything with Spirit after all.

            “Is it from the Academy?”

            “No. It’s from a girl. Marie, is it? I can’t read exactly, the printing’s so small—”

            Stein snapped up in bed immediately and snatched the envelope from his mother. The red and blue envelope told him it was international airmail. His glasses were somewhere in his room—anywhere that wasn’t the bridge of his nose was honestly fair game—so he had to squint at the return address, but he recognized the loopy script immediately. This was definitely a letter from Marie.

            “Ahem. _Könnte ich etwas Privatsphäre?_ ” he asked, slitting open the envelope with a dull fingernail.

            “Oh, of course, of course! I just came in to grab laundry, anyway.” Golda made a big show of scooping up the three dirty socks that somehow missed his hamper and hauling it out the door, hoping to linger long enough that Stein would pull the letter out. But he knew his mother’s game. He waited until her bedroom door firmly clicked shut behind her before he unfolded the papers and started reading. Death, she’d written _six_ pages, front and back.

            _Dear Franken_ , the letter began, and Stein felt his heart rate suddenly spike. Maybe that pesky fever that had plagued him last week was coming back with a vengeance. This would be an opportune time to rerun his test for heart palpitations; the one he did back at the Academy had proven his suspicions false. _How has your summer been?_

            “ _Scheiße_ ,” he muttered under his breath, raking a hand through his hair. “You have no idea, Marie.”

            _I’m not sure when you’ll get this letter, but as I’m writing this, Uppsala has just finished its Midsummer celebration. Do you know what Midsummer is? I’m gonna tell you anyway,_ the letter continued, _even if you **do** know, Mr. Genius. _

            He had to chuckle at that one. Marie delighted in knowing things he didn’t (not in a spiteful way, just for the sake of self-satisfaction), and he admittedly knew little about Swedish culture. So he spent the next few minutes steeped in her descriptions of Midsummer, about dips in the lake at night and dancing barefoot around the maypole and feasts of herring, potatoes, and fresh strawberries. Marie really, _really_ liked the strawberries; she spent a whole paragraph talking about how lush and delicious they were back in Sweden.

            _I wish I could have brought you home for the celebration. I know people and, well, any social activity aren’t really your favorite things, but I think you would have found something to like here. Maybe the coffee. Or maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to put flowers in your hair._

She’d enclosed a photo of her in a _krans_ , a multicolored flower crown that apparently was a huge part of Midsummer. According to the note on the back, several of her little cousins accosted her and wound lily-of-the-valley around the strap of her eyepatch so the little white bells dangled in her face—that wasn’t _her_ idea. Stein couldn’t help but notice her flushed cheeks and how freckled her shoulders were against the soft white of her sleeveless blouse. Her amber eye shone in the flash of the camera and the sunlight above.

            _Knowing you, you’re probably working on some important experiment, because you **never** take breaks. Do me a favor and get some sleep this summer, okay? _ If Stein could find the strength to will himself awake for more than six hours at a crack and hold a damn pen so he could take coherent notes, he _would_ be working on some important experiment like she said. Marie would probably call him a slug for sleeping so much, but mean words in her vocabulary were reserved for people other than him. Realistically, she’d make him a nest of blankets on the couch, make copious amounts of tea, and watch whatever documentaries tickled his fancy. She was sweet like that.

            _I’m not expecting a response too quickly, if at all. Please take care of yourself,_ she wrote. _Love, Marie._

_P.S. There’s a legend that says if you put your krans under your pillow at night, you’ll dream of your future lover. You’ll probably think this is silly, but I dreamt of you._

_P.P.S. Oh God, I realized how you might have taken that. It was **not** a dirty dream, I swear!_

_P.P.P.S. What is your phone number?_

There went his heart rate again. Stein tucked the photo gingerly in his pocket and reached across to his desk for a pen and some paper that wasn’t grid-lined. She very well was going to get a response, and she was going to get it before he succumbed to the fever again, or whatever it was that was making the tips of his ears burn bright red like they were.

***

            It had been five weeks, and they’d already exchanged eight letters. Marie must have camped out by her mailbox and jumped the postal delivery worker as soon as they showed up, scribbling out her responses right away. Stein realized after he sent out the third letter that he was just as eagerly waiting for the mail to arrive. Sometimes he even volunteered to go out and brave the heat to collect it, something which caused both of his parents to raise their eyebrows in surprise. They soon figured out what had sparked the change in Stein’s behavior when Golda discovered the photo that he’d accidentally left in his pants pocket while sleeping.

            “Oh, Arnold, _sie is wie eine Fee!_ Like Tinkerbell!” Golda crowed to her husband while she was sorting the laundry. “Frank, you didn’t tell us you had a girlfriend!”

            “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my partner,” Stein said flatly, holding out his palm for the photo. “At the Academy.”

            “But you obviously care very much about her, boychik. You don’t just keep any old girl’s photo in your pocket.”

            “Mama, _bitte_ _._ I’d like that back now.”

            “All right, all right. But I’m telling your Nana about this, and your Aunt Jennifer. Oh, they’ll be thrilled! Little Franky finally has a girlfriend!”

            “ _Ein Partner_ _,_ ” Stein growled as he took the photo and clomped back to his room. He smoothed the photo out between two pieces of microscope slide glass and pinned it in place with tiny silver clamps. He’d have to buy an actual frame later.

            They’d exchanged phone numbers, too, though it took some negotiating through the time zones to figure out when the best time to call each other would be. Eventually, though, they decided on a date: the second Thursday in August. Stein sat beside the old rotary phone sitting on top of the table in the upstairs hallway, waiting for the minute hand on his watch to inch closer to 2:00 on the dot. Closer…closer…almost there…

            “FRANKY! ARE YOU EXPECTING A COLLECT CALL FROM SWEDEN?”

            “ _Ja, Mama!_ Don’t answer it!” Stein swiped the ringing receiver off the cradle and covered the mouthpiece. “And _don’t_ listen in!”

            “ _Ja, ja_. Lovers’ conversation, I know! Needs to be private.”

            Stein closed his eyes, pinched the end of his permanently crooked nose with his free hand, and sighed into the receiver. “Marie? _Sind Sie das?_ ”

            “Um,” the soft voice on the other end hummed, “… _ja?_ ”

            “ _Es ist so gut Sie zu hören._ ”

            A giggle from the other side. “ _Jag håller med._ ”

            Icy panic bloomed in Stein’s chest. Shit, shit, shit, he’d answered the phone in German, not English! Marie didn’t know German, and she was responding in Swedish, because why wouldn’t she when she was at home? _Ja_ was the same word in both languages and…wait. This could work. If they spoke different languages, his mother, who was surely listening in despite his request to the contrary, would only get half of the conversation.

            “ _Möchte du auf Englisch sprichst?_ ” he asked.

            “ _Det gör inget,_ ” Marie replied, another giggle on her lips. “I don’t mind, Stein. Whichever.”

            “Speak in Swedish. It’ll throw my mother off,” he explained with a smirk.

            “ _Om du insisterar._ ”

            They spent the rest of the conversation chattering back and forth in their native languages. Stein only understood maybe a third of what she said through cognates, but the rest he could glean from the sing-song inflection of her voice. He even found himself laughing at the end of what he’d assumed was a really lengthy pun in Swedish, when it really could have been Marie animatedly describing what she’d eaten for lunch last week. But he found it didn’t really matter. When he was listening to her talk, all the pain and stupor of summer melted away, and it was only her voice that filled him. His fingers traced over the edge of the glass where he keep the photo of her in her _krans,_ a dorky half-smile on his face.

            And Golda, listening in on the other end to her son’s contented sighs and his friend’s giggles, wondered whether she ought to roust out her wedding dress and start planning the reception now.

           

           

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the SteinMarie Week 2016 theme, "More Than One Way to Say 'I Love You'", but I didn't end up posting it on time. I'm not even sure this fits the prompt anymore. Oh well!
> 
> The characterization of Stein's mother, Golda, is a takeoff of the character that DollyPop has developed throughout her fics. The premise of this fic is based on a chat Dolly and I had about how Stein and Marie probably spoke to each other on the phone over school holidays, but in their respective native languages (German and Swedish) out of habit. They may not have understood every word the other was saying, but they could get enough of a gist to laugh and have fun.
> 
> I will go down with this ship now.


End file.
